Here's the Other Kennedy Who's Found Her Home in MAGA Land...For Now

Amaryllis Fox Kennedy

While Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been the one shaking up the DC establishment with his ‘Make America Healthy Again’ agenda, there’s another member of this traditionally Democratic family that’s making her home in Trump world: Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, who has taken up the task of getting the intelligence community’s “black budgets” under control. She’s a former CIA agent, the youngest to get nonofficial cover at 22. 

She’s Jason Bourne—plain and simple. She left the agency in 2010, becoming a skeptic of the agency, which led to her deputy director nomination being torpedoed. Philip Wegmann wrote about ‘AFK’ in March for RealClearPolitics, where he named Sen. Tom Cotton (R-MO) as one of the main figures who led the push to derail her CIA nomination when Trump was mulling her for the company.

It's no big deal: she’s happy serving as associate director for Intelligence and International Affairs at the Office of Management and Budget under Russell Vought (via RCP):

“I like to be in the plumbing,” says the daughter-in-law of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Once the youngest female CIA officer at 22 and whose memoir of a life spent undercover was optioned to Hollywood, she adds, this place “is where you can have the most impact.” She is speaking from the Office of Management and Budget across the alleyway from the White House where, during her first interview since joining the new administration, the ventilation system can be heard kicking on and off. 

[…] 

Rather than working inside just one three-letter agency to reform it, the director of the Office of Management and Budget asked, why not bring the entire espionage apparatus to the president’s heel? Fox Kennedy accepted. Passed over for a job at CIA, she now oversees the entire CIA budget as well as the budgets for the 17 other agencies that collectively make up the intelligence community. 

This makes her the tip of the fiduciary spear, so to speak, in the ongoing White House war against what they see as a “woke and weaponized” government security establishment. The budgets, like the ones collecting dust next to her desk, and other bureaucratic authorities known only to the nerdiest of wonks, Fox Kennedy insists, are the very best tools “to put the Leviathan on the chain.” 

All of this delights Vought, who calls her addition to OMB “a huge deal,” a step toward policing the shadowy corners of the federal government he described as “nearly untouchable.” No clandestine budget or compartmentalized program will be beyond her purview. Instead, AFK will be free to follow the money. “The federal government has been weaponized against the American people, including our president, in ways most Americans have yet to realize,” the budget chief told RCP before likening the enterprise to “our own Church Committee within OMB to end the weaponization for good.” 

But what would you say you do here exactly? “My job is to arm Tulsi and John,” AFK replies, referring to Tulsi Gabbard, director of National Intelligence, and John Ratcliffe, director of the CIA, like old friends, “and all the amazing men and women in the intelligence community with everything they need to do their job – to do it safely and efficiently, protect this country, and execute the president’s agenda.” She continues with standard boilerplate about ensuring that “not a penny of taxpayer dollars is wasted.” 

[…] 

“Even when I was there [at the CIA],” she recalls of past colleagues at the CIA, “they would talk about both Democrats and Republicans, whoever was in the White House, as the temps. ‘Oh, we don’t want to bother the “temps” with that – they’re going to be gone in four years.’” As a result of that attitude, there were entire departments and “parallel command structures,” AFK reported, “that ‘the temps’ have never been allowed in.” Now, as a political appointee and a temp herself, her mandate is to break down those doors. 

“You can’t fund anything like the lawfare and weaponization President Trump encountered in his first term without a firehouse of money,” she said, adding that there was initially “a learning curve in the first administration around how to put the Leviathan on the chain and keep it there.” As a result, AFK continued, “the Leviathan made damn good use of that time. It had a head start.” 

[…]

 “You realize the exact same offensive playbook that we used against people who were killing Americans, and were our greatest adversaries,” she said, “we are using it against the elected representatives of the people in this country, or against any American protected by the Constitution.”

This sentiment makes Fox Kennedy at home in MAGA world and a pariah to Democrats. She comes most recently from the “Make America Healthy Again” wing of the GOP, a coalition where anything big (Big Ag, Big Pharma, and Big Tech, for instance) is viewed with skepticism. She still sticks out. Republican hawks are not known for looking to Sufi mystics for inspiration or talking about the need to root out terrorism by first acknowledging the humanity of the terrorist, as AFK has done. She possesses an undeniably different outlook on the world and a particular set of skills. 

One area that AFK is quite vocal about is her opposition to the Ukraine War. That alone can earn you an extended trip in the doghouse among Democratic circles.

AFK was set to take a key role at the CIA but got derailed by a bipartisan push who worried she’d torch the agency. She has walked a journey like that of Ed Martin, who was interim United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, whose appointment to serve full-time was nixed by Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC). He’s now a pardon attorney at the DOJ and heads a weaponization task force. He’s currently investigating the legality of Joe Biden’s pardons concerning the use of the autopen. 

Despite DC tactics derailing their initial jobs, it’s worked out for both.

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